Leaked Warlords Rogue Video Offers Us a Teeny-Tiny Glimpse of What May Be

If you follow MMO-Champion’s posts, you’re already aware of the Warlords of Draenor early gameplay footage that the Korean site Inven posted this week. These videos are indeed legit; they stem from a press tour that some Blizzfolk (among them PvP honcho Brian Holinka) are doing out in South Korea.

And they include footage of someone playing a Level 90 Combat rogue, very badly, in the “new” Shadowmoon Valley.

I really want to stress that what you see in this video is not necessarily an indication of *anything* that is or isn’t changing about rogues in Warlords. As tech game designer Chadd “Celestalon” Nervig noted in a tweet last night:

@jjones186 We're experimenting with a few potential changes. That build was a snapshot of our state a few weeks ago.

So it’s very possible that what we see in this video no longer reflects what we’ll see when we get our hands on the Warlords beta.

That said, a few bits stand out as new/different about the rogue experience in this video. (The player clearly didn’t prioritize looking at spells, talents, glyphs or anything else related to class mechanics in this demo; they were focused entirely on creating a character and playing in the zone. So we only got to see a very small chunk of rogue stuff.)

The biggest change to our existing talents so far appears in the Level 75 tier, where Paralytic Poison is out (whether it’s a baseline poison or removed from the game entirely, we don’t see), and a new talent, currently named Internal Bleeding, is in:
If you’re having trouble making out that tooltip text, it reads, “Your successful Kidney Shots now also cause Internal Bleeding on the target, dealing 1,626 damage per combo point over 12 sec.”

Over in the new Level 100 talent tier, two of the three talents we saw at BlizzCon — Shadow Reflection and Death from Above — are still there. Master the Basics, though, is gone, replaced by something called “Venom Zest.”

@SvelteKumquat Indeed. It's a talent that increases cooking skill on recipes that involve citrus by 20%, when using Poisons (as ingredient).

(Just to avoid any risk of misinterpretation: The twitversation above is entirely tongue in cheek.)

I missed this during my initial pass through the video, but as other folks have noted, for a split second relatively early in the video we can see the tooltip for the Assassination ability Mutilate. It looks like this:
What this looks like is that Mutilate no longer requires daggers, which would make the Assassination spec “weapon agnostic” for main-hand weapons. But Celestalon was quick to caution against making assumptions:

@SvelteKumquat Please wait for the full patch notes before jumping to any conclusions about this one.

Also pointed out by others: The tooltip for Leeching Poison suggests a buff to the ability (healing for 15% of the damage dealt, up from 10%). This means nothing, however, without a better understanding of the stat squish and the changes being made to healing and damage across the board for all classes. A better understanding that we do not yet have. :)

There’s something different here about the way combo points are assigned to a target. Maybe you guys can figure out what’s going on in the video above, because it’s not quite clicking in my brain yet. If you watch around the 3:40 mark, the rogue kills his target with 5 CPs on it. Then he briefly targets a friendly NPC — and those 5 CPs appear on the NPC. He then targets a distant enemy mob, another distant friendly NPC, and finally yet another enemy mob before he finally begins attacking again — and each time, those 5 CPs appear on each target.I know what you’re thinking — THEY MADE COMBO POINTS STACK ON THE ROGUE HOLY CRAP — but I’m not certain that’s what’s happening here. There are cases, later in the video, in which the rogue kills a target but the CPs don’t appear on his next target. I haven’t been able to determine what makes them copy over sometimes but not others. My best guess atm is that the designers were testing out some kind of auto-Redirect that happens when you kill something with CPs still on it.Regardless, to be honest, this conjecture may not even matter that much — as Celestalon noted in his tweet, they’ve been toying with different ideas, and although CPs on the rogue may well have been one of the ideas they’ve toyed with, that’s no indication we’ll actually see it when the beta hits.

That’s all the rogue-specific changes I was able to spot in the video. Everything else we got a glimpse of (such as the descriptions of, and key abilities for, each spec) appears the same, but note that this doesn’t mean they actually are staying the same — it just means they hadn’t been changed in the particular Warlords build that the player got to see.

[UPDATE 2/21: I’ve added items to this post about apparent changes to the tooltips for Mutilate and Leeching Poison.]

“Increases your maximum energy by 15. Increases your energy regeneration rate by 5% for every enemy you have poisoned, up to 3.”

So, 2 potentially visually exciting abilities, which could also be quite strong when used in the right place, and 1 passive ability, that seems to be about on par with those. Pooling Energy will allow for some pretty awesome burst without the use of CDs, which is great, and I really like the synergy with Poisons as well.

It’s obvious why Venom Zest would be good for Assassination, as the spec is all about Poisons. Sub will of course benefit a lot from the higher Energy Pool for Shadow Dance. For Combat, if it procs from Non-Lethal poisons, then the BF glyph could be a DPS increase for AE situations.